NAB chairman visits Bureau’s victims to apologise for its past sins

ISLAMABAD: In a pleasant surprise, the incumbent NAB chairman has started visiting and approaching those who were wronged by the Bureau, to apologise for the past sins of the much-condemned top anti-corruption body of the country.

Informed sources said the NAB Chairman, Lt Gen (R) Nazir Butt, had decided to help heal the wounds of NAB victims by personally meeting them and tendering apologies over how the Bureau has been mistreating many, including politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen in the past in the name of accountability. These sources said the incumbent NAB chairman had recently visited the family of a NAB victim who died a few years back because of harassment of bureau officials.

NAB’s new policy is completely divorced from what it has been doing for over two decades with government officials, businessmen and others.

NAB is known for its misuse of power. During all these years, it caused public humiliation to many innocents and their families, put them behind bars for months and years without any concrete evidence of corruption against them and even caused deaths.

The Bureau has been massively misused for victimisation of political opponents and political engineering. There are innumerable stories of NAB’s ruthlessness ever since its creation but the tenure of its last chairman Justice (R) Javed Iqbal had no parallel of how the Bureau played with the honor and lives of many, including politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen.

The incumbent chairman is distancing Bureau from its past culture of ruthlessness and cruelty. He has already introduced new SOPs to protect bureaucrats and businessmen from NAB’s past-like undue harassment. The NAB chairman is also revising the Bureau’s SOPs to protect parliamentarians and other public officeholders from arbitrary arrest.

A few years back, a NAB victim was found dead at his Islamabad residence. A handwritten note was found near the dead body. The note read, “I request you, the honorable chief justice, to take notice of NAB’s officials conduct so that other government officials are not convicted for the crimes they had not committed.”

It was also stated in the note that since April 2017, NAB had made his life “miserable”.

“I am giving my life in the hope that you the honorable chief justice will bring positive changes in the system where incompetent people are playing with the life and honour of citizens in the name of accountability,” the note read.

In 2018, social media users were outraged at the indignity suffered by a professor and former chief executive officer of the Lahore sub-campus of the Sargodha University, who was photographed – still handcuffed and shackled – after dying of cardiac arrest while in the custody of the National Accountability Bureau.

A former senior bureaucrat from KP had also committed suicide in 2004 after experiencing intense bout of depression that he had developed after the NAB arrested and jailed him over corruption charges. The NAB and its callousness, however, remained unchanged until the departure of Javed Iqbal. The judiciary has been raising serious questions about NAB’s fairness and even noted that the Bureau has repeatedly been used as a tool for political engineering but no one had stopped it from harassing and hounding innocents.